This time I purchased Turbigomme on a French site called svdiffusion.com. Turbigomme is a gum made to be glued on a pouch. The gum is supposed to be airtight if you go through with a probe. I bought it 8.85 euros (3 meters) + 10.94 euros shipping costs! I was really mad when I reallized that SVdiffusion cheated on shipping costs. Who can believe that a 110 gr parcel could be sent for 11 euros!

Anyway I have now everything: 4 cm Turbigomme piece, a 3 mm Mastrad probe (I know this is very thick but this is a cheap thermometer – less than 40 euros) , 2 rubbers to fix the Turbigomme in the case the self-adhesive would not be enough and a nice piece of salmon.

I glued the Turbigomme on the pouch, strapped it with rubbers and pierced the all with my 3 mm probe. I didn’t face any issue during this process. The pouch did not look like “loosing vacuum”.

During the cooking process I was doubting if air was not coming inside the pouch as I could see some bubbles appearing. I was feeling more comfortable when I saw the other salmon vacuum pouch I made without Turbigomme was doing the same…

To sum up I would say my experiment was successful. 8 euros Turbigomme (plus shipping costs!) and a cheap thermometer (40 euros max.) where enough compared to those very expensive 1 mm hypodermic thermocouples probes (approx. 200 euros) and thermometer.

My only issue was the cooking time. The starting temperature of the salmon was 8°C and it took 30 minutes to reach 54°C core temperature. My water bath was set at 56°C. I decided to take the salmon of the water bath as soon as the core temperature reached 54°C (instead of waiting 10 more minutes as suggested by Viktor Stampfer).

I was afraid the salmon would be overcooked. It was the case…nothing to do with a raw appearance salmon!

Next time I’ll try 72 hours pork ribs. No need of an internal probe for this kind of cooking!!!

I finally decided to make sous vide 48 hours pork ribs. Unfortunatly I had to keep the pouch 42 hours hours in the water bath (57°C or 134.6°F) only.I kept the ribs in the fridge 8 hours but before that I put the pouch some minutes in iced water.I purchased on this occasion a butan blow torch for 12 euros including the butan can.The result was very good, very tender.I am asking myself if 6 hours more would have changed something. What do you think?

Everybody is mentioning Thomas Keller watermelon compression technique. I didn’t have any watermelon in my fridge but I had a great melon waiting for being eaten. My vacuum machine is definitely not as powerful as a pro machine. Therefore my issue was to determine if my Lava 100 (max. vacuum is 0.8 bar) would make enough compression to change the texture of the melon.
I had some difficulties to vacuum the melon as juice was coming out of the pouch. I made several tries and finally decided to freeze (not completely) my melon before vacuuming it. This way no melon juice got into my vacuum appliance.
I let the vacuumed melon 24 hours in the fridge.

I can’t say this try was a success. The flavour is similar to the one that was not vacuumed. The compression worked quite well and the melon was definitely more compact. The texture in mouth was interesting. I can imagine that with more vacuum the texture would have been more interesting.
Next time I’ll try with a watermelon!

Down to my home is a fantastic fish shop. I could not resist when seeing this huge and beautiful 2 Kg Atlantic salmon. This was a great opportunity for me to try my new toy…the Julabo EC immersion circulator.

Recipe: I just put some lemon slices inside the salmon, put the salmon in pouch and vacuumed it. Temperature 56°C (138.2°F) for 12 minutes.

This Julabo is a war machine. The 56°C (138.2°F) target temperature was reached so fast (even with my 20 litres water bath) and was very steady thanks to the water pump. Haaaaaaa! The time when I was using a gas or an halogen stove to cook sous vide is now so far to my memory. What a pleasure to switch on a machine, fix the temperature and that’s all!

The result was fantastic…juicy, looking like row but in reality cooked. I invited my neighbour who heard about my experiments and where very curious to see what is cooking sous vide with an immersion circulator.

For the purpose of measuring the range of temperature variation of my water bath I poured 14 litres of tap water at 43°C (109.4°F). My target temperature was 58°C (136.4°F).
I approx. need 34 minutes to reach my target temperature which is very long compared to the gaz and halogen stove experiment. This can easely be explained by the 14 litres water to heat compared to 4 litres container I heat with the gaz and halogen stove experiment. The range of temperature variation is of approx. 4 to 5 degrees if you are not taking care. But if you remain close to your water bath and play with the thermostat (see on the graph T5 for thermostat 5…) you can easily remain in a range of 2 degrees. This range of 2 degrees (that could be considered as acceptable) was facilitated by the fact that my container was fed with 14 litres water. Nevertheless you can’t remain close to your cooker if you want to cook a meat for a long period! Therefore cooking sous vide with a basic water bath is not a good option.